I'm truly failing to understand this. What's a recourse that you have with upwork? Not paying the contractor that did not deliver? You can not pay contractor who does not deliver to you via another method. People in the entire world like to get paid with US dollars. Those who live in the countries that provide bodies for upwork have bank accounts or methods of receiving dollars. They would gladly communicate that to you. Taxes? Upwork clearly does not handle taxes for you. If you are in the US, you are responsible for your taxes. i

If you're in Russia, you can't just receive dollars from someone in US. You have to pass currency control, you have to provide documents to your bank that those funds were earned. I guess, there are means to bypass those regulations, especially for small sums of money, but they are risky, so not everyone will use them. That's why worker might prefer something like odesk, those companies usually have established processes to transfer money and get necessary paperwork.